Wildfire housing project meets with neighbors

By Claire Woodcock

Trail-Gazette

Posted:
12/17/2018 01:12:24 PM MST

Melissa Westover is retiring from her position as the Estes Valley Restorative Justice Partnership's Executive Director and manager this week. But her work is not done. She is turning her attention to young working families struggling to find housing.

"We know the deep need just by watching our children, who are young professionals in the community, try and find housing" she said. "We saw what a huge barrier they were facing on a number of levels."

When she was in her 20s, it took several years for her and her husband to find housing here. And when they did, it wasn't without a struggle.. Today she sees the housing market for young working families in even worse shape than ever for young working families in the Estes Valley. This is what motivated her, her husband Mark Westover, as well as Rick Allnutt and Susan Allnutt to partner on a duel legacy project that would bring long-term workforce housing to the area.

Westover envisions a neighborhood where people can work, live and play together. There will be two parts to the housing project. One part would be workforce housing, and the other would be single family and townhomes. None of these units can be used as vacation rentals.

Approximately 120 units are being projected. She said the owners and developers saw this as the best way to help their community for years to come.

"Lots of people that work for the hospital, school district, town and other entities commute back and forth, and many who do live here live in substandard housing" she said. "There's a lot of turnover as a result of that and so we end up losing people. It costs businesses, and any entity in town, to have to continue to retrain these people for these important jobs."

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The group met with Lonnie Sheldon, owner and principal engineer at Van Horn Engineering & Surveying and Steve Lane, president and principal architect with Bas1s Architecture and Design.

When they reviewed Lane's architectural plan, they noticed Crossroads Ministry was sticking out. Westover has volunteered for and has served on the board of Crossroads. Knowing that the organization was interested in moving buildings, the Westovers offered the organization their current office building in trade for the Crossroads property.

Brian Schaeffer is executive director of Crossroads, said the organization's current home wasn't fit to serve all their clients' needs, and rebuilding themselves would be costly and would cause them to reorient clients.

"We've been able to provide all the services, but we'd love to have them all on one floor and not have stairs," he said. "The building that the Westovers' currently own is a lot newer and a more energy efficient and larger space."

Recently, members of the community that live in the area of potential development gathered at the Shepherd of the Mountains Lutheran Church. This is the first project that has been required to have a meeting between the pre-application and application stage of development. Schaeffer was there and said aggressive personalities were there opposing the project.

"Generally five percent of the homeowners come to speak and generally the ones coming to speak, they're not coming to learn about the project," he said. "They're coming with their preconceived agenda of putting an end to the development. They're coming to protest, not with an open mind."

Sheldon counted at least 30 people in attendance. Several outspoken individuals cited issues like density, traffic impact and the preexisting condition of some of the property as an open field.

"That open field was private property," he said. "That's not open space, it's somebody's property. On traffic, I told them we were expecting to have to put in a turn lane and we were agreeable to that. On density, we said that the large bulk of the density comes from the RM-Zoned land. We're not proposing to make it all RM-Zoned land. It's a mixed zoning proposal."

Westover said the group understands that the project will change the neighborhood, and they intend to be transparent with the neighbors throughout the process.

"We're not hiding anything," she said. "We're having these meetings and trying to listen and trying to adjust to meet the needs of the neighbors. We're not trying to do anything underhanded. We're trying to be as open and honest as we possibly can."

Sheldon expects to propose re-zoning basically the entire property though not turn it all into an RM-Zone, adding the property is in the only zoning district where double-density is permitted.

Sheldon said the group is looking to submit their first submittal in mid-January. It will consist of three parts: subdivision, re-zoning and annexation. An additional submittal will consist of the development plan for the RM-Zoned land.

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